Greg Nicotero Says The Walking Dead Premiere Will Make You Cry

The Walking Dead is finally returning this weekend, and we all know what that means. One of the characters on Negan's chopping block will be brutally killed off, and we'll get to see once and for all if it were worth the six-month wait (hint: it probably won't be). But according to director and special effects master Greg Nicotero, the premiere will make everything worth it, and we should all make sure to bring tissues.

When asked in a recent interview with Variety if he thinks fans will think the reveal was worth the wait, Nicotero answered:

I would probably say that people will be sad, I recommend watching the episode with lots of Kleenex, and there will be a lot of questions and a lot of whys and "What's going to happen next?" and "How could you?" but that's attributed to us spending seven years creating characters that people care about.

He also revealed that the decision of which character to kill wasn't necessarily a unanimous one in the writers' room, and that they were considering other alternatives:

It's really about propelling the story forward. I remember when I found out I was upset, and the first thing I thought was, "I wonder who else it could be?" But you have to understand that certain characters will propel different people into different directions. It wasn't a matter of a unanimous vote, but we have a very important story to tell and we have to honor the direction that the show will go. The hardest thing on our show is acknowledging who has got to go.

These new bits of information are interesting, but also nothing unexpected. The cast and crew have been hyping the premiere even harder than usual after fans' anger over the finale, and we only assumed that they would be forced to kill off someone the fans actually care about in order to justify that cliffhanger. As we ran down in our final predictions yesterday, that probably only leaves Daryl, Abraham, Glenn, and Maggie as possibilities (or some combination, as the case may be).